skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Addiction's downside is that gains are subjected to the law of diminishing returns.

100% nailed it. They stopped being able to develop hits that could keep up with the diminishing returns they were seeing on their old games.

I always thought that had Zynga just focused on keeping their slot machines shiny, accessible and easy to use, they wouldnt be in this mess. Instead they decided to reinvent the slot machine every year or so. It worked for a while but there's only so much you can do before you have to start outright copying. In other words, fight diminishing returns by continually improving the game rather than continually building new games.
It's been years since I tried gentoo (and eventually decided it wasn't for me), so I had to look up USE flags. Great idea.

I've never run Arch, my impressions are from what I've read. Coincidentally it was the python3 thing that helped me decide not to use Arch.

Since I don't run arch (or gentoo) I don't speak with any authority. Searching around, I saw something about yaourt, which may or may not serve the same intention for the type of distro that arch is.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Yaourt

Dunno.
>There isn't a single device for Sprint or Verizon

Uh, The Galaxy Nexus, SGSIII?
Left you a message there, but just in case you miss it - Very cool! Would you mind linking to http://anvilformac.com/download so this automatically downloads the latest version?
Astronomers Spot Sudden Black Hole Flare Up
An Anatomy of Truth: a network scientist examines the half life of facts
Which is a feature that came from Android. Next you're going to be telling me how cool you are because you can install and update apps over the WiFi.

Hey, how's that Facetime over 3G/4G? Hope you're not on AT&T.
Aren't updates on by default? That means a lot of Consumers get them. They did upgrade people to IE8 this year, for people taking updates.
Yes. After CS the most common degrees for developers tend to be either Maths or Physics, there's plenty of maths grads working in software development.
The "fat" is the visible part but the reality is that Zynga's share price won't move until they can show investors, and the market, that they've evolved past their current library of games. As an investor, I don't care about the pennies on the dollar represented by the vending machine and the organic chips. I want to see them evolve (and have that evolution translate to the bottom line) and until they do, you won't see a meaningful upward move in their share price. The waste you've identified is a red herring.
Just wait until you hit 40 and getting a full time salaried job becomes asymptotically more difficult (unless you're in a special field like embedded or one that requires clearances).
This is interesting. I've heard mentions of very large numbers for bankers, lawyers, doctors as they move up the career ladder, but normally involving starting their own businesses or being made partner. Do they really outearn developers significantly, even as employees? Maybe I should've stuck to trying to get into finance...although once the entrepreneurship bug bites, it isn't quite so easy.

I'm in a country where the wage difference between the protected professions and the rest is pretty large, and programmers are pretty much commodity employees with little advancement opportunities. The only way to break out seems to be entrepreneurship, but the local market isn't big enough to support big or even medium exits. I guess that's why so many people try to get into medical and law school or into i-banks.
I always love how much developers think they can save skimping on hardware. $700 is a day worth of downtime. My Macbook Air is easily worth $4000 to me now because it broke 3 times and they turned it around each time in under 24 hours. When my windows laptop breaks im with out it for 2 weeks requiring me to purchase another one.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but I think the specific value of 12 in this example is an error from using an original description at http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg099... — the original description uses the value of 2 hours (12 * 10 minutes), whereas Paul's does not.
Microsoft has always had great developer resources for their proprietary platforms. Whats changing is they are being forced to embrace open standards/platforms due to market realities.
This not being a causal study, I wonder if higher coffee consumption is linked to other factors that may or may not cause glaucoma... say, computer work.
To be fair s/he did include marketing of your services among the set of things that were requisite that you be good at to pull it off.
Good point. The only other competitive product I can think of is Vimeo but it's more niche. It seems to be mainly very high quality videos and artsy videos. I guess Facebook is also a competitor but personally I rarely see videos uploaded to it.
Practical (Non-Moral) Reasons to Choose Open Source
Professional Software Engineer Exam coming in April 2013
All currencies have price deflation built it, for some macroeconomic reasons about motivating agents that I don't fully understand yet. It could be a good thing for economic growth, or it may not be. Let's leave that issue aside.

Just to be clear, the reason that governments increase the currency supply is that citizens will do it with or without them. The most fundamental currency is a promissory note, an I.O.U. Every time you write someone an IOU you inflate the supply of currency, because the holder of that IOU can pass that around to others in the form of payment. Instead of sending your bushel of apples to the shoemaker who made your shoes, you now have to send half to the bread baker, and half to the candle maker as that IOU was spent.

A currency that doesn't grow will be naturally replaced by one that does. This is my biggest problem with bitcoin.
Pirate Bay Founder Wins Back Passport from Swedish Embassy
Thanks, that's really good to hear (I love big problems!)

My research is in abstract algebra (specifically Lie theory and algebraic geometry), which is pretty far removed from statistics or applied math in general.
I understand where you're coming from. PASSION (with capital letters) is important. PASSION for programming is what got me to get a BA and MA in computer science. It's what makes me sit in front of my computer working on side projects whenever I have a chance to. However, the point of this article and the original one is not that. These articles speak of the day to day stress loaded routine job of a regular* developer. And this is where passion (with lower case letters) is not important. My point about the 1% vs the 99% is that not everyone works for Google, Facebook ... In fact, all the contract workers I know struggle a great deal to make ends meet. We need to broaden our analysis to the sate of programming in the whole world. I am not talking about silicon valley or the bay area, which I consider to be the 1%. I had the chance of working in mid-west USA and in a foreign country and I have friends working in other countries. All I can say is that the majority of them don't want to be programming when they are 50.
Google's Game Resource
http://www.ideabdl.com/
Making Difference...|All kind of IT Solution
ideabdl.com,You can bayer, provider or contractor of outsource for software, we offering you come,see & make.
How do smart companies market their services?
I'm using stack machines now because, like you said, they're small. Meaning, you can fit a ton of them on a chip, and if you can get them to talk to each other, you have yourself a pretty powerful parallel processor. The chip I'm working with has 144 cores running at ~700MHz, and it costs $20. It's insane how much being small buys you.
Since then the result seems to be that stack vs registers, it doesn't really matter as much as people thought. A modern processor that's out of order [1] has to reconstruct the dependencies in the dataflow graph anyway. Out of all the things going on in a processor, doing so from a register ISA or from a stack ISA is not that different. A bare bones stack machine may be smaller than a bare bones register machine, but nobody wants to run those anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-order_execution
The badlands:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sngBcF5M-AU

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_Badlands
I love the article, and I do agree focus & clarity is more than important for a young business. But when a team/company is successful, you need to be able to spread your focus on more than one thing.

True success it is (I think) if you can enter any market, build the best product, and dominate it.

Thanks Jason!
I get his criticism of evolution and the big bang theory- that is par for the course for guys like him- but embryology? I have never heard this particular critique before. I did not know this field was a point of political contention.
I think it is shift in focus that is the root cause of this issue. There are plenty of avenues for online gambling as well as real ones, where they extract money out of the wallet.

However, the question is in exchange for what? As long as the focus is on the entertainment quotient I think these businesses do just fine. The moment the focus of business shifts to just extract every possible dollar out of its users, people get smarter & just leave. This is probably what is happening with Zynga.
Spotify has to pay royalties on every song play, which adds up extremely quickly considering you can just leave it running all day without even listening to it (like I do accidentally almost every day). There's not particularly an easy way to just "leave Netflix on".
The YouTube team has just done a phenomenal job scaling to demand and building a simple, no-frills-attached platform.
What does YouTube fail on that we need an alternative for? Fast download speeds, speedy uploads, many ads that YOU CAN JUST SKIP (!!), it seems like they have nailed the perfect spec and product. Plus, I don't think many could even dream of competing with the technical demands that YouTube probably sees every minute on their servers.
Thanks for the warning. I'm working on a project right now that I should be releasing soon to help with the "real project" problem.

This is another thing I'm afraid of - being overqualified/people thinking that they are actually my backup job. Is there any way to combat this?
> It's probably difficult to recruit teenage goths and turn them into good narcs.

It's easy. Bust a teenager for possession of narcotics, then offer them a choice between years behind bars, and acting as an informant busting drug dealers.

See: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/03/120903fa_fact_...
Yeah, I didn't mean for my comments about society to necessarily be a complaint, more that I was surprised by how strong that outward push was. Sure I expected people to be weirded out, but what I didn't expect was for how alienating that felt. Actually, what I didn't expect was that something that was comfortable and an adventure would generate not a pulling in force but a pushing out. It wasn't, 'are you ok can we help', or, 'whats your story', it was 'wtf get out of here'. It just made me think about all those times that we all/I avoid or get weirded out by people that are different. And how that very action of being weirded out can make them weirder.
"but I've spent plenty of time in east Oakland without incident, statistically the 4th most dangerous city in the country."

You do what you can do to protect yourself. While crime can and does happen everywhere there are places that you are more likely to be a victim of a crime. Probability wise of course.

Even with respect to car theft you will find that insurance companies charged rates depending on where you live and even where you park your car (garage etc.) There is a basis for this you know.
I work with the ASP.NET team to coordinate some of the content for this site. We're always interested to hear what you like and don't like about the site, what you'd like to see more of, etc. Thoughts?
With the title of TFA.
Not for a minute. The releases are pretty much shelved after v.next. To add to that, the support you do get is crappy, even as a gold partner. ASP.Net MVC is awfully designed and rather buggy as well from experience.

I've been using it on a huge project (145 controllers)since CTP2. I wouldn't use it again.

we're currently investigating werkzeug, python, sqlalchemy and postgresql as a replacement for a new project, particularly also because we got shafted by SQL 2012 per core licensing.

Stay away - you have been warned.
A randomly generated file will in a crushing majority of cases not be compressible in this way.
DIY Home Automation?
Do you have a Home Automation system and if yes, did you create it yourself? I want to hack my home in a way that it's completely secure and at the same time I can remotely control it without paying thousands. There are a couple of projects in Kickstarter related to this and I wonder how far can we get in making our homes both secured and at the same time smarter.

Thanks for sharing!
You might have a case for promissory estoppel if you bought one after they claimed they would upgrade. If you bought one before? Not so much.
If you're near a major city in the western world, I think it will take you about two weeks to find a job. You can spend the first two weeks of that visiting your favourite national park or beachside resort.

On the last Friday pick up the phone and call your three favourite tech companies in the area. In this market, in all likelihood, you will have an offer or three lined up by the next Monday afternoon.
Quite a few professionsnow require you tositall day looking at the screen, but they differ in compensation while sharing health risks.
And I don't see many occupations where the risk is much milder.
Definitely. I'd imagine it wouldn't very hard to find even a paid internship if she puts the legwork in.
"A currency that doesn't grow will be naturally replaced by one that does." seems right, as long as the minimal discrete value of the currency that doesn't grow cause a problem for the economy.

But if you can move from discrete to continuous space (bitcoins can be cut up to 1E-8, and according to what I've read this is not a fixed limit), why bother moving to the other currency ?

(I hope I get it right - it's an area I don't fully understand)
Yeah, I've heard about the Wall Street programming options for mathematicians, but it is not a field that I'm interested in.

Actually, the CS dept at my uni has a big computer vision research program. I should go talk to them.

Thanks
Dude it's a $25 one time payment. You could have made that in the time you took to complain about that price. Plus, Amon has built in exception tracking, which is one less service to pay for versus using something like Airbrake or Exceptional.
It's a harder technical problem than people think, in terms of scaling and encoding smoothly (and playing smoothly while the rest of the video loads, which Vimeo can't seem to do). Google also has tons of fibre in addition to server infrastructure.

It's also extremely hard to break even, as even a low resolution video in bandwidth terms is many times larger than a news article. News articles often manage to squeeze in more ads than YouTube did initially as well and news on the web is fairly cut-throat and thin margin. With an article you can just examine the plain text to put a relevant advert there, with video it's much harder (although certainly possible). There is also a problem with discovery and search related to this which needs high level machine learning and thus your average "we took a regular service - taxis, maids, food - and make a phone app which uses GPS and calls it to your house for a premium" type startup guys probably don't have a clue about what would be necessary.

There was also a lot of speculation that Google has been running YouTube at a loss since acquisition. If that's true it means that their partner program was paying content producers for a long time out of Google's pocket rather than out of real viability. So a competing site going for just technology needs to understand that they are competing with a distributed stable of talent. The same goes for paying money to music producers. A startup would get legally slammed just as they were taking off (and running out of runway). Perhaps the more aggressive advertising and long commercials at the start of videos is now exploiting this subsidy-created monopoly, and perhaps in turn that will give rise to a competitor.

edits: multiple, "steaming smoothly" to "playing smoothly"
How To: Fix Disqus 404 Errors In Google Webmaster Tools
I used AttributeRouting for a fairly large ASP.NET MVC 3 project. I found it really clean and useful - I preferred having the routing information declared on the methods themselves, rather than in some generic routing table, or a single catch-all route. With this library, you don't have to explicitly define a route on every method, there are convention-based approaches, and different levels at which you can define the base route, then more specific routes as you get closer to the methods themselves.

I also used T4MVC, which may have fallen by the wayside, but that kept a lot of the "magic strings" out of the code.

http://mvccontrib.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=T4MVC
"SVMs. . .3)can be trained online, which makes them great for huge datasets (here the point 2) might not apply - but there exist ways - if someone's interested I can point out some papers)"

Please do. I want to read some about SVMs since i haven't heard that much about them.
Good catch Bobinator

We intended to launch the Mentor Shares site so you could both view the page and download the documents without registering, but the open download bit obviously didn't stick.

We've updated the page now and you can download the docs freely.

Having f6s generate a doc for you still requires log-in.
On some systems, random(4) can block, and urandom(4) can't. Blocking can harm program correctness. The security difference on systems where random(4) behaves differently from urandom(4) is marginal. I don't think this is a point worth sweating over, given that most systems use things like Mersenne Twister and LCG algorithms for their randomness.
Does Google's relationship with the NSA nullify its privacy policies?
One thing that made me chuckle is "Ship it fast and ship it often", which is both good advice for building software and for order fulfilment.

I like Fab.com and I'm a repeat customer, but the terrible shipment times are something I use as an example in my work. I'd buy a lot more if I knew I'd get things delivered faster than the usual 3-4 weeks.
Currently given a tracking number you can only get the following info:

Package weight

Shipping date

Who signed for it (last name)

Where package was left

Town delivered to

When delivered

And some other nominal info.

In the old days you saw exactly who the shipper was and detailed info on the recipient and recipients address. There was probably other info but what I've listed is what
I remember. I remember thinking at the time that it would be valuable and contain exactly what a competitive company would need to gather a list of potential customers.
He very much was "just a businessman". An effective one, perhaps, and one who lucked into a new market, perhaps, but he was indeed very much a businessman.

He wasn't an engineer of any outstanding merit--see how he tried to nix expansion slots on the old Apples, or the Atari debacle, or other such things.

Moreover, he's done nothing but create lasting damage as a role model for future CEOs (have you ever dealt with a CEO doing something stupid because "Steve was right"?) and foster a culture of isolation and consumerism in technology. Apple v. Samsung is rubbish, and the petulant Android vendetta is hardly something we should celebrate.
Bjourne -

Notice the OP mentioned "promotion, estimation, and pricing" as part of being great.

Thomas Fuchs quotes clients at $800/hr ( http://script.aculo.us/thomas/ ). Thunderbolts labs is quoting $277/hr for their consulting rates ( http://thunderboltlabs.com/ ). And these are people that publicly advertise their rates. I know several other individuals at these levels that just don't publicly advertise.

Skills in this context includes (self)promotion; it's not enough to just code. No one (usually) comes knocking on your door after a great commit. But if you put yourself out there, stand by your work, talk to lots of people and show that you're a problem solver, by all means, you can triple even quadruple your income as a developer.

Honestly, it sounds like you're a good developer, so you're probably already half way there. Put up a site that outlines your major open source commits, your ability to cut through the BS and distill the problem to it's necessities. Tell the client that you ship on time.

Your world will open up with (financial) possibilities my friend.
Not related to the site, but now there is an audience... regarding asp.net mvc:

Can we have support and out of band releases for asp.net mvc without having to go through connect or partner support, which are both to be honest, utter shit?

Also can you get the API right and leave it right so we don't have to piss around for a week with our container and testing environment.

And finally, can you give us something better than razor which has a parser that isn't made of broken twigs and has proper separation of content and programming language (its horrid sorry). Jinja2/django/golang templates FTW.

Oh and sort out SQL 2012 licensing. It's going to cost us £768,000 to upgrade out kit from 2008 to 2012. Postgres migration is an order of magnitude cheaper.

I'm coming from a large asp.net mvc project and its not pleasant, sorry. Welcome to Microsoft centric development!

Content on the web site is pretty good though.
Your argument is so weird to me. Not because I think you're wrong about every job having a bunch of tasks that are tedious and annoying, but because the same thing is true of every single thing we do in life. Jobs aren't unique in this manner, the same thing is true of any creative hobby, relationships, etc.

"Far too many people chase a "dream job" not understanding that every job will have parts they simply will not love."

I don't think that is true, I think most people realize any jobs just like anything at all in life, won't be 100% fun stuff. It is just such an obvious common sense thing that they don't bother talking about it.
You just bundle the JRE... Oracle has their own tool to do that now.

https://blogs.oracle.com/talkingjavadeployment/entry/packagi...

I think JavaFX will be pretty great.

Personally though, I think I'll be using node-webkit for my desktop apps.

https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit
Firebird client for Node is updated : 0.0.7 with annoying bugs fixed:
Hmmm interesting... If it uses that much less silicon then I imagine you could save huge amounts of power. A lot of people would be interested.

There must be some tradeoff then. Companies are burning huge amounts of cash buying data centers in remote areas because of power. Presumably it's not very hard to compile C to stack code. (Or maybe it won't be as efficient as... Forth?)

Or maybe most applications aren't really CPU limited. I remember reading about Chuck Moore's low power processors, but they seem to have mostly specialized applications. In that case it's probably not fair to compare them to x86.
For Ruby there's RubyMine

I've tried RubyMine, and I'm much more productive in vim.

If it comes down to having to spend a lot of time mastering this or that IDE, I still think I'd come out ahead with vim.

The bar here is that the IDE has to make me more a lot more productive than I could ever be with Vim.
Win a Playstation Vita (WiFi)
author here: i've written 12x10 minutes, and the original description writes 12x10 minutes. is there something i've missed?

it takes 10 minutes to find a solution, but only after 12 solutions have been found (the chain has been extended 12 times total), can the authenticity of the first of those 12 be guaranteed.